Determination of Climatic Boundary Conditions for Vehicular Real Driving Emission Tests 2019-01-0758

Vehicular Emission testing is gaining importance over the past years in the wake of requirements for real driving emissions with implementation of RDE packages across Europe / USA and various developing countries. Extending the same concept for other countries poses slight challenges in terms of geographical and climatical conditions prevailing in the country, where the climatical conditions are differing from Europe / USA. It is a challenge to accept the same boundary conditions as in Europe, at the same time the challenge is to find a threshold number in a more scientific manner. This study concentrates on determination and recommendation of thresholds for ambient temperature and altitude. The basis for temperature threshold would be to determine the percentage of time the temperature exceeded beyond the threshold over year in the country. The basis for Altitude is considered based on the percentage of total length of roads beyond the threshold altitude limit. For both threshold limits determination, the base data are obtained from publicly available open sources. Processing of the geographical coordinates and the historical climatic data is the key element of this paper. Python programming language is used along with geopandas module for the geo data analysis and mapping the temperature data Road network details available as line strings in shapefiles for the country is used along with the elevation details for calculating the total road length where the roads are beyond the threshold altitude. Percentage of road network length available in a country beyond the set threshold altitude and the percentage of ambient temp greater than the threshold temperature is calculated and mapped across the geological map. The tool developed can be used for recommending thresholds for any given country.